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BROBDINGNAGIAN

12/13/2024

brobdingnagian: a giant

If you've never read a very famous piece of 18th Century literature, you're probably wondering where this term came from. If I told you its antonym is lilliputian, would that give it away?

The land of Brobdingnag was where the giants lived in Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel, Gulliver's Travels. It was the second strange land that the title character visited, after Lilliput, where people averaged about 6 inches high. Just as lilliputian became synonymous with tiny, brobdingagian came to mean gigantic.

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